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various small town papers in upstate New York (“Police Chief Election To Be Held Saturday”) and gradually moved up to the New York Times , going after the kind of local stories buried on page four of the Metro section (“Priest Talks Jumper Off Whitestone Bridge,” “Chimpanzees Found In Bronx Apartment—Owner Pleads Ignorance”). Stern was a ringmaster in the word circus where reporters used prose style aimed at seventh-grade syntax. While his editors never took the stories seriously, the paper’s marketing department started noticing one reader poll after another in which Stern’s stories and byline were the only ones readers could remember. The publisher, well aware of the importance of selling newspapers, ordained that the Times give Stern his own column.
    For Mark, this was a personal emancipation proclamation, freeing him to be an iconoclast who stylized the eccentricities of the frenzied, dispirited commuters who poured into the New York City subway system every day so they could make a few bucks, go home, sleep, wake up, and do it all over again.
    The column went platinum when the paper suggested he collect his observations into a book, Sterner Stuff . It spent a few weeks on the bottom of the bestseller list and spawned a sequel, Latitudes and Attitudes , that landed Mark on Letterman and Charlie Rose. The liberal management of the Times certainly gave Mark healthy latitude to lampoon everything from what he called “the Neanderthal nature of twenty-first century man” to the myriad verbal blunders of a sitting president. In short, he had achieved celebrity status, with his name and picture on the sides of hundreds of city buses. And he had done it all while keeping a few posters of whales and condors on his apartment walls.
    Reporters like Stern didn’t usually get calls from the Wall Street Journal , regardless of talent. The Journal was famous for supporting presidents and political potentates who were always optimistic, even if the Dow suggested that the nation’s financial roller coaster was bottoming out. The paper was decidedly conservative, always bullish, and rewarded writers who regarded William F. Buckley as a thoughtful moderate. Stern, however, had written eloquently on the Enron scandal while at the Times , championing workers while simultaneously skewering the likes of Ken Lay and company. And he had done so with less irony in his prose, showing compassion for the countless employees who lost a lifetime of savings to executives and their golden parachutes.
    Articles on corporate greed, coupled with Mark’s high profile and clear ability to build readership, coincided nicely with the Journal’ s sudden feelings of guilt over their deification of Lay and other recently fallen robber barons. In a moment of self-expiation, the publisher of the Journal called Mark and offered him the plum assignment of reporting on the movers and shakers who the Journal highlighted on page one, far left column. If your byline appeared in that coveted space, you had arrived. Mark extracted the promise of total autonomy, but wondered just how many sacred cows he would be able to gore before the publisher forgot his promise.
    His lawyer, always the realist, negotiated a million-dollar termination clause into Stern’s contract. Thus, each time Mark received the inevitable phone call from the publisher attempting to smooth over the roughing-up of yet another Wall Street deity, Stern would glibly ask, “Did I do a mil’s worth of damage yet?” So far, the answer was no, although over the years he had learned how to hone his journalistic dagger into a stiletto and slide it into his victim without a sound.
    Even so, his trademark attitude was still visible to his loyal following that saw an undercurrent of dark satire hiding beneath the sometimes seemingly benign commentary. Stern saw himself as a modern-day Mark Twain, who was regarded as a humorist and children’s author when, in point of fact, he had been